Archive for December 2014

Pie the Ninth - Pear & Cranberry Pie with optional Ginger Spice Crust

      This is a truly lovely pie. It's lovely to smell while it's baking in the oven. It's lovely to look at with its scarlet juices and gold-tinged crust. And it's especially lovely to eat, served with a scoop of the smoothest vanilla ice cream you can find (homemade is best, of course). The flavors just scream "Christmas" to me, but you can make it any time. It's the perfect foil to a cold day, a reminder that even the dreariest winter has treasures to offer.

      I'm dividing this recipe into two parts, the filling and the optional pie crust. The pie is lovely with regular crust, but if you want to add that extra something-something, there's an alternate crust that adds an extra punch of gingery spice! It's rare for people to add spices to pie crust, because they can burn and turn nasty. However, we're only adding ginger, and if you play your cards right it'll pay off nicely. 
      Alas, I don't have photos at this time--if I make this pie later in the winter I'll add them, but for now you'll just have to use your imagination and trust me!

Z.D.'s Pear & Cranberry Pie with Thyme & Red Wine
makes one 9" pie

Ingredients:
3/4 Cup sugar
3/4 Cup dried cranberries (sweetened is OK, but do NOT used flavored)
2 large sprigs of fresh thyme
1 & 3/4 Cup fruity red wine (I like a cabernet), divided
2 Tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into bits
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 Tablespoon (generous) AP flour, plus more for dusting
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
3 lbs. firm but ripe pears (I like Bartlett, but Anjou works well also)
2 Tablespoons (scant) tapioca flour
Two rounds of pie dough
1 large egg, beaten with a spoonful of cold water (optional)
3 Tablespoons raw/turbinado sugar for decoration (optional)

Directions:
 - In a medium size non-reactive pan over medium-high heat, combine the sugar, dried cranberries, thyme sprigs, 1 & 1/2 Cups of the wine, and bring to a boil. Cook, stirring occasionally, until liquid is reduced to a little under half. 
 - Strain through a fine mesh sieve into a small bowl. Pluck out and discard the thyme twigs, but reserve the cranberries and set aside. 
 - Place your empty saucepan back over medium heat, and melt the butter. Add in the flour and nutmeg and whisk constantly just until smooth. Pour in remaining 1/4 Cup wine and cook, whisking frequently, until mixture is smooth and slightly thickened, about 1-2 minutes. Slowly whisk in the red wine syrup until thoroughly combined, then stir in vanilla and salt. Pour into a bowl and chill until cool, about 30 minutes.
 - Meanwhile, pre-heat your oven to 375º F, and place a rack on the lowest level. Peel, core, and slice your pears into 1/4" slices (slightly more or less is fine, as long as all slices are approximately the same size for even baking). Place the sliced pears in a large bowl and toss with the tapioca flour and the reserved cranberries.
 - Roll out your pie dough to fit a 9" pan. Arrange your pear mixture into the dough, then pour your red wine liquid over (if your red wine mixture is too thick to pour, that's OK; stir it into the pears and then spoon the mixture into the dough-lined pie plate). Top with remaining dough, cut steam vents and crimp the edges.* If desired, brush the top dough with the beaten egg and sprinkle with raw sugar. 
 - Place pie on a rimmed baking sheet and bake on lowest oven shelf until top is golden and juices are bubbling, about 45-50 minutes. (Check at the 30 minute mark--if your crust is browning too quickly, tent with foil, reduce heat to 350º F, and add an extra 10 minutes to your bake time.) Remove pie to a cooling rack and cool to room temperature before slicing.

Z.D.'s Ginger Spice Crust

Ingredients:
1 & 3/4 Cup flour
1/4 Cup crystalized ginger, chopped
2 Tablespoons brown sugar
generous pinch of ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
10 Tablespoons unsalted butter, cold, cut into pieces
3 Tablespoons shortening, frozen, cut into pieces
1/3 Cup ice water
1/4 Cup ginger-infused vodka**

Directions:
 - Place flour, crystalized ginger, brown sugar, ground ginger and salt into a food processor. Give a several long pulses to combine. Add the butter and shortening and pulse until mixture resembles coarse sand.
 - Mix together the water and vodka. Pour about a third into the food processor, then turn on the blade while slowly pouring in the rest. When the dough begins to come together in large clumps, stop. 
 - Remove the dough from the food processor, halve, and pat each half into a disk. Wrap tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least two hours, or up to five days (or freeze for up to three months). 
NOTE: if you use this crust, DO NOT place the pie plate on the bottom of the oven--the crystalized ginger will burn. A pie that uses this crust must be put on another baking sheet and raised at least one shelf level above the oven floor.



*If you're feeling fancy, this is a great pie for pretty crust. You can do a lattice, if you're so inclined. Or you can roll out the top and use a tiny cookie cutter to cut out holes for steam vents--round holes look cute and modern, but stars or snowflakes are pretty, too. You can also use a larger cookie cutter to cut up your top crust, then layer the pieces to make a pattern for the top of your crust (where the pieces overlap, brush the dough with your beaten egg to sort of glue them together). If you use a simple cutter like stars, you can layer them in six branches for a kind of snowflake pattern!

**Buy cheap, plain vodka, pour some into a jar, and keep it in the back of your fridge. Whenever you peel some ginger for a recipe, put the peels into this jar. After a few months, strain and stick in the freezer for pie crust!

The Writer and Her Laptop

      A little over a week ago, my laptop refused to turn on.
      It had been ailing for awhile, shutting down spontaneously and hesitating before restarting. It had also developed an identity crisis, believing itself to be a desktop instead of a laptop computer, and only working when plugged directly into an outlet. Yet despite these obvious symptoms, I was in stark denial: my trusty computing device was scarcely over two years old! My husband has the same computer, of roughly the same age, and he wasn't experiencing any problems. Whatever was going on must be a temporary quirk, I reassured myself.
     Until that day - Black Thursday - when it just refused to turn on at all.
     I was lucky, really: Apple said it was a manufacturing error and all the repairs and replaced parts were done for free. Otherwise, the cost would have been somewhere between $300 and $600, which is not how one wants to be stretching one's wallet during the holiday season. But taking my laptop into the "Genius Bar" was rather embarrassing. Why did it have to be MY laptop that broke down? I never do anything with it! I don't edit blockbuster movies, or write computer code, or work on complex astrophysics equations. Heck, I barely even visit "YouTube!" I check email, read comics, look up recipes, and write. And occasionally research the kind of bowler hat that was worn in the historical era where my story takes place. That's it.
      Now I'm starting to wonder if my laptop broke because it was experiencing ennui....
      This kind of behavior isn't limited to my computer usage. I don't use a smart phone, I use a clamshell that makes phone calls, and occasionally receives text messages. I shy away from GPS (this is partly because of the multiple, dramatic GPS failures in my life), and the MP3 player I use is a hand-me-down that's nearly 10 years old. Why? Because that's all I need. My father was a "buy a good product and use it until you wear it out" kind of man, and that's a value I happily embrace. But try explaining this to someone whose livelihood (and possibly their life philosophy) depends on promoting the Next New Thing, or a friend who seems to have the technological capabilities of the USS Enterprise* in their pocket, and it's amazing how stupid you can start to feel.
      Then, while my laptop was broken, my "whatever" attitude towards technology was brought into question. I was not without computer technology at this time: I still had an iPad mini (originally used for a business venture that fell through last year), and an older PowerBook G4 from when I was in graduate school (which my husband has nicknamed "Lazarus"). The iPad mini was good for browsing the internet and checking email, but even with an attached keyboard it was NOT going to accommodate Word in the way I required. Lazarus still had an old version of Word, but over time it had developed an unhappy glitch where I could type a whole sentence, and only the first half would appear on the screen right away. It would take a second or two for the rest of the words to slowly appear, as though a ghost were transcribing them for me. This was probably because my fingers were working faster than Lazarus' poor little microchip (I am a very fast typist, on a comfortable keyboard I average 90 words per minute). When I made a typo, or decided halfway through a sentence to change a word or two, these quick corrections became very slow. This put a serious cramp on my composition.
      And don't even get me started on the painfully sluggish attempts at Google Drive and similar cloud-based documents...if I had a dollar for every time I saw that spinny rainbow wheel of distress, I could probably have bought Christmas dinner for eighteen people.
      But great stories don't require computers, I told myself. Hell, the "Epic of Gilgamesh" was pressed onto clay tablets with the tip of a reed! I swore to myself I would not allow this to interfere with my writing: I would do as countless geniuses have done before me, and write on paper! And I did...a little. Not as much as I should have. Which led to embarrassment and frustration and gnashing of teeth. So apparently, I have come to rely on a certain level of technological comfort? And then I realized: I'm not a rebel, I'm too lazy to keep up with technology. And the feeling of stupidity sank in even further.
     My brother is a software engineer in Silicon Valley, so I called to tell him of my woes while awaiting news of my laptop's fate. I expected him to tease me, or offer some gentle prompting towards joining my generation for once. Actually, he told me something brilliant. He said, "Technology is supposed to make our lives easier. So if what you do with your life is read email and write stories, and your laptop makes that easier, then that's a good thing. But when we start manufacturing reasons to have more technology in our life, then it's not making our lives easier, it's changing our lives to suit the technology. And that's stupid."
      It may have been my imagination, but I think at that moment, there was a part in the clouds, and beam of golden light shone down upon me, accompanied by a harmonious sustain chord of singing.
      I got my laptop back yesterday. It's running as good as new, and I'm "happy as an angel...merry as a schoolboy," to quote a certain famous fictional curmudgeon of the season. I immediately starting typing merrily on my story, looking up recipes for Christmas cake and latkes, and updating my blog. Life is good. Life is easier with my laptop...because that's the kind of life I lead.

      Now I know a lot of you are trying to figure out what's going on with the pie situation. There will be two pie updates before December 25th, I promise. One will have photos, and one will not. The one with photos will be a Turkey Pot Pie, made with leftover Thanksgiving turkey (you all froze some, right?). The other will be Pear & Cranberry Pie with Gingerbread Crust, which I have made before, but will not be making this year, due to the presence of eight kinds of cookies, two other pies, a flourless chocolate torte, and a wild huckleberry trifle at my holiday table. Yeah. That's how my family rolls. But if you're looking for something utterly wonderful for a holiday dessert, and you don't need pictures, my pie recipe will be well worth the effort.
Stay tuned.


*NCC 1701-E, no less

Tradition

      I promised a review of my Thanksgiving attempt at Alton Brown's Super Apple Pie, and I am nothing if not a woman of my word when it comes to food. If you care to read the recipe (go ahead...I'll wait), you will see that it has taken the construction of what most people consider one of the simplest fruit pies to a level of complexity that may be best summarized in the following analogy. Regular Apple Pie : AB's Super Apple Pie, is like One Room Log Cabin : Frank Lloyd Wright's House of Falling Water. Ok, everybody on the same page now? Good.
      But I was game. Unable to locate good Braeburn apples, I only used three of the four recommended varieties, but I think that was no biggie. I also refused to go out and hunt for a two-inch deep tart pan with a removable bottom (can we say "uni-tasker," AB?), so instead I employed one of my many springform pans, a nice 9-incher I inherited from my maternal grandmother. And I am pleased to say that it worked perfectly in every respect, so I recommend one for pie purposes.
      The final pie was indeed delicious. The apples were tender but not mushy, the flavor was distinctly apple without being overwhelming. The applejack made for a tasty, tender crust.

And that little pie bird poking its head out is ADORABLE!
      But would I make this pie again? Probably not. I don't think the final product was sufficiently superior to my regular apple pie to warrant the extra time and effort. The thing is, my own recipe for pie crust is consistently tender (and if I infuse the vodka with ginger, the added flavor is awesome). I know enough about buying good pie apples that I don't need the melange. I cannot honestly say I got much flavor out of the Grains of Paradise--maybe I should have added more? The amount called for in the recipe seemed small. And frankly, I've never had much trouble getting pie out of a regular pie plate. *shrug* I guess I'm just talented that way.
      What I DID take away from this recipe was the use of tapioca flour (not to be confused with tapioca pearls) as a thickener for the filling. Bloody Brilliant! At first I was feeling disgruntled that I was buying yet ANOTHER flour for my kitchen*, but once I discovered the silky results, I was sold. I highly recommend that you try it.
      One of the reasons I made an apple pie for Thanksgiving was tradition. Tradition was also responsible for the turkey**, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes (thank you again, dear guest, for bringing the best sweet potato dish I have ever had in my life, EVER), and even the plate of carrot and celery sticks that everyone ignores. Tradition also dictated the way I set the table, and the dishes I used. My guest and every friend and family member I talked to on the phone that day brought up their own traditions at least once.
      Another Thanksgiving tradition is football, and the Ohio State/Michigan game is always held the weekend following the holiday. As my husband was pointing out, that rival game is also fraught with tradition, including the OSU marching band forming the word "Ohio" with the tuba dotting the "i."
      Being a writer, these kinds of things prickle my mind on multiple levels, and I started thinking. At what point, I wondered, does the repetition of an action constitute a tradition? Let's start with the food thing: someone brings a dish to a holiday meal - let's say collard greens - and people enjoy it. The same dish is brought the next year. And then the next. Now, there are a few possible reasons for this recurrence, which are not mutually exclusive. There's the popularity of thing--if everyone likes it, then you know you have a hit, and of course you want to please. Then there's the also the laziness factor: you don't have to go through the process of deciding what to bring, digging out the recipe, making it, and then risking the displeasure of your fellow diners if you fall back on a previous success. And after enough time those collard greens may become expected, and you don't want to disappoint people. Which, I'm starting to think, may be the point at which it becomes a tradition.
      Traditions provide a feeling of security and continuity, adding to the over-all comforting effect of holidays. They can also bind us with the past, as with my family's traditional recipe for stuffing, which I believe now spans five generations; making it is not only adding something delectable to the meal, it brings back memories of previous holidays, and makes us feel closer to the dearly departed. Some people cleave to tradition as though it were a matter of life or death. Others eschew them, either casually or with intense deliberateness. Most of us do a little of both.
      As a writer, it occurs to me that which traditions are embraced and which are discarded say a LOT about a person, and makes a wonderful tool for character development. In the first chapters of my zombie story, our protagonist seeks out fellow professionals, and is greeted with varying levels of respect and tradition, which allows me to sketch their characters quickly and efficiently. This was not a deliberate choice at the time, but now that I'm thinking about it, well...go me, that was a great choice!
      How about you? Got any great - or crappy - traditions to speak of? Do you use them at all in your writing, or can you think of any that lend spice to a favorite story?


*I already have AP flour, cake flour, spelt flour and white rice flour on hand at all times, and bread flour throughout the cold months. My pantry space is not infinite. In my perfect universe, entering my pantry would be not unlike going through the wardrobe into Narnia, except my mythical world would be a cross between the awesomest grocery store, Pike Place Market and Candyland, and everything would be free. But alas, this is as yet only a fanciful dream.

**Incidentally - and not to brag o'er much - I am the turkey queen. Seriously, I have obscenely good luck with roasting delectable, tender, photo-worthy turkeys that are juicy through-and-through, with no weird gimmickry. I'm not going to blog about it here, but if you want to know how I do it, just ask.

The Most Random

      After four days of carb-loading and sleeping in, getting up at 5:30 this morning was rather a bit of a shock. Sometimes when I'm sleep deprived I get grumpy. More often, however, I get goofy, and not necessarily in safe or helpful ways. Which means I probably shouldn't be blogging right now. But, in the words of McWatt, "Oh, well, what the hell!"
      So here's two random things to start your week. First of all, how out-of-it was I this morning? I went to go put on a pair of socks, and just stood there, staring at the plethora of various foot clothing, for no less than four straight minutes. I couldn't decide which socks to wear. I was paralyzed by the plethora of options! So many socks! So few feet!!! How was I going to get out of my pajamas and into real clothing at all!?!
      I did, eventually. Or at least that's what you're led to believe. You can't see me. For all you know I might still be in my pajamas and slippers, utterly sockless. You'll just have to trust me.
      And now random #2, which I'm sure you'll find much more enjoyable that stories about my to-stocking-or-not-to-stocking dilemmas...
      ...the first teaser-trailer for the new Star Wars movie came out over the weekend! NERD-GASM!!!!!
http://www.starwars.com/video/star-wars-the-force-awakens-official-teaser
      There! Isn't that awesome?! Isn't that awesome!?!? Did you see the people? And the stuff? And the effects? And the Millennium Falcon!?!! This already looks sooooooo much better than the last movie. My inner child is going to be holding its breath in anticipation until the release date in December 2015. Which she can do without asphyxiation because, you know, she's a psychological metaphor.
SQUEEE!

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